Words about science and hiking
Phage therapy isn’t ever going to be the cure-all envisioned by overly-enthusiastic science writers. But it doesn’t have to be. Curing some patients of some indications is a noble and worthy goal in and of itself. And maybe when we learn to use phage therapy in limited applications, we can start thinking about tackling sepsis Read More …
This one comes to us from the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC and is particularly heartbreaking: a 2-year old with congenital heart disease suffering a post-surgical Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. Pseudomonas infections are particularly liable to become resistant over the course of antibiotic treatment, and in this case treatment options were limited by allergic reactions to Read More …
A hundred years of phage therapy has produced many claims for its utility. Almost none of these claims are backed up by compelling evidence. By “compelling” I mean randomized controlled trials, rather than anecdotes or case studies. The problem with case studies in infectious diseases is that most patients get well on their own, even Read More …
As I’ve mentioned before, PT suffers from a lack of well-designed clinical trials. Part of this lack can be attributed to a mind-set of true-believerism among PT practitioners. Part of it can be attributed to a dearth of funding required to design and execute trials – not just for PT, but for anti-infective therapy in general. Read More …
Clinical research on phage therapy is somewhere between comatose and dead. A search through ClinicalTrials.gov reveals only a few sporadic attempts at bringing PT to the clinic. Many of these are Phase 1 safety/dosing trials which have no apparent follow-up: A 2008 P1 trial of PT for venous leg ulcers found no adverse events, but no difference in outcomes Read More …
The rise of diabetes in the developed world has brought along a rise in persistent ulcers and abscesses. These infections don’t respond particularly well to either systemic or topical antibiotics and as a result, an unfortunately high proportion are resolved by amputation. This is nobody’s notion of an acceptable medical outcome. Phage therapy has been Read More …